Epistemic Injustice and Epistemic Redlining

ABSTRACT

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• oppression
• violence
• redlining
• Michigan
• Emergency Management
• democracy
• water
• social justice

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Christine Koggel, Richard Matthews, Ami Harbin, Kathryn Norlock, and an anonymous reviewer for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank Shea Howell, Thomas Stephens, Gloria Aneb House, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Tawana Petty, Monica Lewis-Patrick, Debra Taylor, Marian Kramer, Maureen Taylor, Sylvia Orduño, Ann Rall, Valerie-Jean Blakely, Baxter Jones, Kim Redigan, Emily Kutil, Julia Cuneo, Kate Levy, Sarah Coffey, Fred Vitale, William Davis, and many others besides for their collective leadership and indefatigable love-waging. I am grateful to Monica Boch, Alix Davis, Jeff Davis, Áine Keefer, Joseph Longo, Kevin Mager, Trent McClain, and Mike Wolfe for responding to this work so thoughtfully and generatively. Finally, my thanks to the audiences at the Dalhousie Philosophy Colloquium Series and the 33rd International Social Philosophy Conference for engaging me in helpful discussions on these topics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.